Julie Taymor officially out at Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, because of all the perfectionism

Naturally, the producers put a positive spin on Taymor’s reduced role, claiming that it was only her “previous commitments” that made it difficult for her to attend to the 24/7 schedule necessary to fix the show, while insisting that “her vision has been at the heart of this production since its inception and will continue to be so.” However, the New York Times says that it’s her unyielding commitment to that vision that led to her ouster, as within the past few weeks she repeatedly balked at letting anyone make changes to show, refused to meet writers and other outside counsel, rejected their suggestions for improvement, argued with cast members about their qualms with the story, and generally ignored all of the producers’ concerns about the direction the show was headed in. Well, of course: "Concerns" are just so many crosswinds on the precipice of a dead volcano, if you catch our drift.

While Taymor herself has yet to offer so much as a haiku on those accusations, her equally melodramatic friend Jeffrey Horowitz of New York’s Theater for a New Audience has been giving interviews on her behalf, telling the NYT, “This is like a mother being taken away from her family. She loves that family. She wants that family.” Won’t someone think of the high-heeled spider-children?  Horowitz then lashed out at Taymor’s many critics in the Associated Press, saying, “She's distraught at how she's been labeled. They've said she's an artist only concerned with spectacle. I can tell you that all her visual ideas come from a deeply human idea of the story she is working on. And they say she's a `perfectionist'—well, what's wrong with being a perfectionist?" Alas, it now seems Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark’s relentless pursuit of perfectionism is at an end.